Increased utilization of solar power is highly desirable as solar power is a readily available renewable resource with power potential far exceeding total global needs; and as solar power does not contribute to pollutants associated with fossil fuel power, such as unburned hydrocarbons, NOx and carbon dioxide. Solar powerplants produce no carbon dioxide that contributes as a greenhouse gas to global warming—in sharp contrast to fossil fuel powerplants such as coal, oil, natural gas, or even biofuel powerplants. Limitations to the widespread deployment of solar power, either solar photovoltaic power or solar thermal power, have largely been a consequence of higher power cost per kilowatt-hour for traditional solar power systems as compared with fossil fuel power systems, driven in large part by the cost to make these solar power systems.
As an enabler for low cost solar power, the idea of using inflatable heliostats (devices that track the Sun's apparent motion), was first proposed in the pioneering U.S. Pat. No. 5,404,868 entitled “Apparatus Using a Balloon Supported Reflective Surface for Reflecting Light from the Sun.”